[New Entry by Tristram McPherson on October 7, 2015.]
We sometimes think about the ethical significance of merely possible circumstances. People sometimes wonder, for example, if it would have been wrong to break certain promises that they in fact kept. Examples like this do not exhaust the significance of possibility - or modality more generally - in our ethical thinking. Rather, we also seem to be committed to a certain modal structure in our ethical commitments. To see this, consider an example. Suppose that a bank manager wrongfully embezzles his client's money. If we imagine holding fixed how much the bank...